The Spymistress

by Jennifer Chiaverini

  As the evening approached and Lizzie and her mother called for the carriage, Eliza, who had been sweet and cheerful all afternoon, suddenly planted herself between her grandmother and aunt and the door. “No,” she said firmly, stamping her foot. “Don’t go.”

  “Eliza,” exclaimed Mary, as Annie stood nearby, tears filling her eyes as she looked from her sister to her mother to Lizzie. “Behave yourself.”

  Lizzie knelt in front of her youngest niece, who thrust out her lower lip and valiantly fought off tears. “Eliza, dearest,” she soothed, embracing her. “I’ll miss you too, but it’s all right. We’ll come back next week, or perhaps you and your mama and papa and big sister shall come to us.”

  Eliza peered up at her. “To stay?”

  Lizzie felt her heart wrench. “No, my sweet little lamb. You live here now.”

  “I hate it here,” she shouted. “I want to go home.”

  “Eliza, that is quite enough,” snapped Mary. She glanced about for Hannah, but the nurse was already hurrying over to whisk the unhappy children from the room. She moved stiffly as she crossed the floor, which told Lizzie that Mary had neglected to purchase the liniment Hannah relied upon to ease the pain in her knees. Furious, Lizzie could only murmur a few soothing words to Eliza before Hannah took the girls by the hand and led them off, hobbling slightly.

  “You could move back, you know,” Mother said gently, her eyes on John’s. “It might be better for the children.”

  “In these times, it’s better for us to live apart,” John said in an undertone. “You know I’m right.”

  “Of course he’s right,” Mary chimed in, having easily overheard. “Your Union sentiments mark everyone close to you with the taint of disloyalty. It’s bad enough that we all share the last name. I can’t imagine how much worse it would be for us if we lived beneath the same roof again.”

  “My word, yes,” Lizzie retorted. “You might not receive any more invitations to the Gray House, and your dear friend Mrs. Chesnut might pretend not to know you. How dreadful! I can imagine nothing worse. Oh, except, perhaps, for starving in a crowded prison that stinks of piss and vomit and is rife with vermin and disease. Perhaps that!”

  “See?” Mary looked to John and gestured toward Lizzie. “This—­this vile language is what I must shelter the girls from. In her words, her deeds, and her very ideas, she is a terrible influence.”

  “I’m a terrible influence?” echoed Lizzie, astonished. “Which of us sips whiskey from a hidden flask when no one is watching? Which of us takes laudanum when the days are too dull and the children too lively?”

  Mary’s mouth fell open in shock. “John,” she spluttered, “husband, are you just going to stand there and—­”

  “I agree it is bad that we all share the same last name, Mary,” Lizzie said tightly, “but not for the reasons you do.”

  “That is quite enough,” said John firmly. He took Lizzie by the arm, offered his other elbow to Mother, and steered them toward the front door. “Sister, if you want to persuade her to never let you see your nieces again, keep behaving as you are right now.”

  The bright, swift flare of her anger had burned out, leaving a fading residue of remorse. “I’m sorry,” she said as they stepped onto the small front porch. Peter, waiting with the carriage on the street, was watching them, his brow furrowed in concern. “When she said that about the Van Lew name—­”

  “I am no less offended, and I will speak to her about it.” John’s voice was grim, and his grasp on her arm eased. “I—­I suspected about the whiskey, but I knew nothing of the laudanum.”

  “Neither did I, until she did not deny it,” Lizzie admitted. “The remedy Mrs. Chesnut recommended for headaches—­do you recall Mary mentioning it a few months ago? Her behavior changed for the worse shortly thereafter.”

  He stood with head bowed for a long moment, then straightened and escorted them to the carriage. Lizzie could not be certain, but she thought his eyes glistened with tears.

  “The longer this war endures, the harder it will be for Unionists to remain undetected,” he said, leaning into the carriage while they settled into their seats. “You’ve heard about the arrests.”

  “Men of the lower classes only,” said Lizzie, feigning nonchalance. “Drunkards, criminals, the insane. Undesirables the war excused the new government to clear off the streets.”

  “They will not stop with the undesirables,” John said. “They will not stop with men.”

  “They would not arrest a lady from a good family,” protested Mother.

  “Not today they wouldn’t,” said John. “But someday soon. Enemies wear petticoats as well as pantaloons, or so the papers warn us, remember?” He shut the carriage door and regarded them through the window. “I will speak with Mary.”

  “And in the meantime, Lizzie will write her a sincere letter of apology,” said Mother.

  Lizzie knew better than to argue. “I won’t sleep tonight until it is finished and perfect. I will be as humble and ingratiating as I can possibly be.”

  “Be sure to have Mother read it over before you send it,” said John. “I don’t want to worry you, but all of Richmond is going to suffer in the months ahead, even Church Hill. The time may come when all we will have is one another, and you may be grateful for Mary’s friendship then.”

  It was difficult to be grateful for something she’d never had, Lizzie almost said, but instead she merely pressed her lips together and nodded as the carriage pulled away.

  It occurred to Lizzie, later, that perhaps something John had overheard at the Davises’ levee accounted for his uncanny prescience.

  Soon after the unfortunate dinner at John and Mary’s home, the newspapers buzzed with the story of a Mrs. Curtis from Rochester, New York, the sister of a soldier with the Rochester Regiment, who had been captured at Falls Church dressed in military attire. The Dispatch called her a “Female Hessian,” the Whig described her as “quite young, but by no means prepossessing,” and all agreed that she did not disguise her animosity toward the South, and that she was certainly a spy.

  Lizzie’s nerves frayed as she followed the story through newspapers and the rumor mill, wondering what terrible fate awaited the accused spy. Although she was somewhat comforted to learn that Mrs. Curtis was being detained in a private home rather than some dark corner of the prison complex, Lizzie was plagued by nightmares and waking dread until the middle of the month, when Mrs. Curtis was unconditionally discharged and returned to the North.

  If Lizzie were arrested for spying, and thereafter convicted, would she be banished to the North? It might not be so terrible to wait out the war in Philadelphia with her sister, Anna, who would surely take her in. Or instead, since she was Richmond born and bred, would the authorities imprison her with murderesses and women of the streets, or execute her for treason as an example to others?

  The very thought of it made her dizzy and sick, but as the days passed, one unerring truth emerged from the fog of her apprehension: She must protect her mother—­not only her health and security, but also her reputation. If accusations of treason fell upon the household with the full force of the Confederate government, Mother must be blameless.

  Throughout August, while Lizzie brought food and money and goods into the prisons and smuggled incriminating letters out, the Confederate Congress took aggressive measures to thwart Union sympathizers. First they passed the Alien Enemies Act, which compelled men over fourteen who were not citizens of Southern states to swear an oath of allegiance to the Confederate government. If they refused, after a forty-­day grace period, they would be deported. John was a citizen of Virginia, so he was not obliged to take the oath, and as women, Lizzie and her mother were exempt, but the law’s foreboding overtones filled Lizzie with apprehension for what might come next. She did not have to wait long to find out. At the end of the month, Congress passed the Sequestration Act
, which authorized the seizure of property belonging to Unionists—­men and women alike.

  The dreadful law strengthened Lizzie’s resolve to disentangle her mother from her clandestine activities. The Church Hill mansion and the rest of Father’s estate were in Mother’s name, so even if Lizzie were caught and convicted, the Confederacy could confiscate only her personal fortune of nearly ten thousand dollars. Mother would not lose her home, nor could their servants be taken away and sold.

  Mother would be protected, Lizzie reassured herself when she woke at night in a sweat, her heart pounding from fear-­induced nightmares. Mother would be protected, but only as long as she could not be implicated in her daughter’s deeds.

  Perhaps Lizzie should have moved out, she thought miserably, and left the home to her family, for their own good. But it was too late for that now—­and where would she have gone?

  The harrowing month ended with the revelation of a cautionary tale that, under other circumstances, would have overjoyed Lizzie—­the arrest and imprisonment of a Confederate spy in Washington City. Born in Maryland, Rose O’Neal Greenhow had been orphaned at age sixteen after her father was killed by his own slaves, and she had moved to the nation’s capital to live with an aunt. Later she married a prominent doctor and became a popular hostess among the city’s social elite, and when secession fever broke out, the newly widowed Washingtonian pledged her fealty to the rebels. Since the beautiful, wealthy, and vivacious Mrs. Greenhow had an utterly unimpeachable history of entertaining distinguished politicians of all party affiliations at her mansion on Sixteenth Street, Confederate General Beauregard’s adjutant recruited her to gather information about Union military operations from her unsuspecting guests. Some admirers credited her with gathering and smuggling out crucial secrets that led to the Confederate victory at Manassas, but the praise brought her to the attention of the famous detective Allan Pinkerton, who placed her home under surveillance and arrested her a few weeks later. Mr. Pinkerton’s detectives tore apart her home searching for evidence, recklessly knocking down shelves and strewing the family’s possessions upon the floors, with utter disregard for precious mementos, including the belongings of Mrs. Greenhow’s recently deceased child, which had become cherished relics.

  As August drew to a close, Mrs. Greenhow, her young daughter, and a few other women accused of corresponding with the enemy remained under house arrest in her Washington mansion, which soon became known as The House of Detention for Female Rebels or Fort Greenhow. There they awaited their unknown fate.

  While newspapers across the South lauded their loyal daughter of the Confederacy for her courageous devotion and denounced the Yankees for treating a woman so harshly, Lizzie knew that, woman though she was, she herself could expect no gentler treatment if the Confederates discovered the Union sympathizer in their own midst.

  Chapter Eight

  * * *

  SEPTEMBER-OCTOBER 1861

  S

  eptember brought no relief from the torrid summer, nor from threats against Unionists. Throughout the South, but especially in the mountains of western Virginia and eastern Tennessee, men who refused to disavow their loyalty to Mr. Lincoln’s government were arrested for treason and sent to Richmond to be incarcerated. Lizzie expected one day to discover Mr. Lewis among a new shipment of prisoners, but until then, she liked to think of him still free and unharmed, still urging his fellow Western Virginians to break away from the Confederacy and return to the Union as a new state.

  By the first week of September, there were nearly fourteen hundred Union men confined within the four prisons on Main Street, and three hundred fifty more, the most desperately sick and wounded, at the hospital. The prisoners included about sixty officers and a handful of civilians like Congressman Ely and the lawyer Mr. Huson, who, Lizzie was surprised to discover, had run against Mr. Ely in the election for his seat in the House, and like his former opponent had been captured in the chaos after the Union rout at Manassas.

  Not long into September, Mr. Huson came down with a terrible fever. Mr. Ely campaigned for his friend’s release—­not only was he gravely ill, but he was also a civilian—­but Lieutenant Todd flatly refused. Lizzie resolved to plead Mr. Huson’s case to the lieutenant herself, so she instructed Caroline to pack a basket with his favorites, ginger cake and buttermilk, and added a bouquet of autumn blossoms for good measure.

  When she asked the guard to take her to see the lieutenant, he gave her a curious look and said, “You must mean the captain, Ma’am.”

  “I suppose I do,” said Lizzie, surprised. In her opinion, nothing about Lieutenant Todd’s service merited a promotion. Perhaps the guard, whom she did not recognize and was likely new at his post, was mistaken.

  But when she arrived at the commandant’s office, she stopped short in the doorway. A tall, dark-­haired man with a full, untidy beard stood behind the desk, which was cluttered and disorganized to a degree Lieutenant Todd never would have tolerated, sorting through stacks of papers and muttering to himself. He looked to be about five years younger than herself, and he wore the uniform and insignia of a captain.

  “Captain Gibbs, sir,” said the guard. “Miss Van Lew to see you.”

  The captain glanced up, his gaze traveling from her face to the basket on his arm. “Miss Van Lew,” he greeted her, wiping his palms on his trousers before gesturing to a chair and seating himself. “Lieutenant Todd told me much about you. I was expecting you to call eventually.”

  “Why, the lieutenant never mentioned you at all,” said Lizzie, concealing her surprise behind a show of disappointment and mild affront. “I do hope you like ginger cakes and buttermilk. They were his favorites.”

  “I like them very much indeed,” he replied, his eyes lighting up eagerly. She had scarcely set the basket on his desk before he was digging into it, and by the time she had arranged her skirts gracefully and sat down, he already had ginger cake crumbs in his beard.

  “I shall have to learn your favorites too.” She paused to allow him time to finish eating, but the noisy smacking of lips and licking of fingers was so off-­putting that she had to look away. “I gather that you have taken over as commandant?”

  “Yes. Quite an honor. Quite a responsibility.” Vigorously he wiped his palms over the desk, scattering crumbs on the papers. “Of course, I would prefer to be on the battlefield, but one must serve where one’s duty requires.”

  “I wholeheartedly agree.” Lizzie paused, preparing herself. “Duty is, in fact, what brings me to you today, Captain: my duty as a Christian and as a lady to dispense charity with mercy upon the sinner as well as the just. You have in your care a desperately ill gentleman, a civilian, who will likely perish if he is not returned to his family, whose tender ministrations may yet restore him to health.”

  “You refer to Calvin Huson, the lawyer from New York.”

  “Yes, Captain, I do.”

  “I could paper the walls of this entire room with the notes his friend Mr. Ely has consumed in writing to me about him,” the captain remarked, and Lizzie smiled obligingly. “Of course, I must refuse.”

  Lizzie kept her expression serene. “And why must you refuse, Captain?”

  “I’m reluctant to criticize my predecessor, but regrettably, his discipline was wanting.” Captain Gibbs shook his head, frowning. “The prisoners are unaccustomed to a firm hand. They must learn, and quickly, that I will not indulge them as he did.”

  “Releasing a gravely ill civilian to his family is not a sign of indulgence but of mercy.”

  “I would not expect a lady like you to understand.” Captain Gibbs’s smile was patiently condescending. “I cannot free every prisoner who falls ill.”

  “I am not asking you to release every ill prisoner—­”

  “Not yet, but this is how it begins.” He rose and came around to the front of the desk. “Fruit pies.”

  She blinked up at him. “I beg your
pardon?”

  “You asked for my favorites. Your ginger cake is delicious, but I prefer fruit pies.” He shrugged apologetically. “I confess I don’t care for buttermilk.”

  “I won’t forget.” She rose, extended her hand gracefully, and managed to put some warmth into her smile as he shook her hand and bade her farewell.

  Rebuffed but undaunted, Lizzie went over his head to General Winder, just as she had done when Lieutenant Todd would not cooperate. There she ran into another immovable obstacle. General Winder would not release Mr. Huson without receiving an equally valuable Confederate prisoner in exchange, but President Lincoln and Secretary of State Seward refused to exchange prisoners, because to do so would be tantamount to official recognition of the Confederate government.

  Outraged and increasingly alarmed by his friend’s worsening condition, Mr. Ely flooded the prison mail with letters to officials both North and South, imploring them to initiate a system of prisoner exchanges to alleviate suffering on all sides. Even the Richmond press seemed to support the idea of prisoner exchanges, not only to benefit Southern soldiers held captive in the North, but also to relieve the Confederacy of the great expense of keeping so many Yankees under lock and key. “Within the past ten days, $700 has been expended for bread for their consumption, and $2,000 for meat,” the Enquirer complained in mid-­September, going on to estimate that the Yankee prisoners cost the Confederacy around eleven thousand dollars each week. “It has been found necessary, within a few days past,” the reporter continued, with an irritating air of satisfaction, “to discontinue the rations of coffee and sugar hitherto allowed the prisoners, and the deprivation is said to have told more upon the spirits of the Yankees than any other circumstance connected with their captivity.”

  Disgusted, Lizzie concluded that only someone who had never set foot inside the prisons could believe that.